It was 2010. I was 14, and cycling was fast becoming my entire personality. I had just watched a three-week duel between Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador, and I knew that I wanted to try my best to emulate them and work towards the goal of riding the Tour de France much like they had.
Watching them fly up mountain passes faster than I could ride on the flat lit a fire in me that burned for over a decade. At this early stage in my road cycling career, I didn’t know much about the demands of pro cycling, but I did know one thing. My heroes looked nothing like me.
With dreams of Alpe d’Huez and the Col du Tourmalet etched into my prefrontal cortex, the drive to do whatever it took to find out if I had what it took was like nothing I had felt up until that point. In many ways, this taught me a great deal about myself and what I am capable of with an appropriately massive goal and a drive to match it. But it also showed me that emulating your heroes on TV can lead to lasting consequences – some far from healthy.
Chasing the wrong end of a dream
With the limited resources available to a 14-15-year-old at the time, a lot of what I understood about cycling and performance came from what I watched on TV. Where I lived at the time, there were no cycling clubs nearby for me to attend and be taken under the wing of an elder who could show me the ropes of club-level cycling. Instead, my understanding of cycling was largely based around three weeks in July, and the occasional additional race I would get to watch if I was around my grandparents, who had Eurosport.
For me, the mountains were what cycling was about, and that insatiable desire to seek out tough climbs still remains. It was presented as the ultimate test: your legs, lungs, and heart exchanging blows with gravity. Unlike sprinting or crit racing, riding up a hill was simple, the tactics straightforward. I didn’t understand physiology – I thought you could just choose what kind of rider you wanted to be. For me, being a climber and challenging for the polka dot jersey was about as cool as it could get.
Did we do a good job with this story?
